Ithaca, NY: Ground Zero for Small Town Jew Hate Part III

Short Takes

The Hamasmobile pictured above is the handiwork of Josh Dolan, known on Instagram as @sasquatch. He painted his car expressly so he could roll it proudly through the “Volvo Ballet” part of Ithaca Fest, a multi-day celebration of arts and culture held in downtown Ithaca. Thousands of people line the streets for the spectacle. Here’s Dolan, in the driver’s seat:

A few weeks later I spotted Dolan’s handiwork while running errands. There it was, still making its statement.

And now, Ithaca’s political establishment has decided that Dolan is just the sort of person it wants weighing in on matters of public safety.

Under Mayor Robert Cantelmo, the Ithaca Common Council approved Dolan’s appointment to a two-year term on the Community Police Board, a body charged with investigating citizen complaints against the police.

Objections to the appointment from one citizen and two councilmembers cited Dolan’s confrontations with police and his provocative social-media posts, some of which have been scrubbed. Yet his appointment sailed through with remarkably little public attention. Perhaps because the public documents announcing it contained nothing about his qualifications—or his history.

My Freedom of Information request for that information is pending. To be continued.
Dating as a Zionist:

E. is a single mother looking for her bashert—the person she hopes will be her romantic match. Like plenty of people in her generation, she turned to a dating site. But she added a caveat to her profile, hoping to save time and discourage Jew haters from making contact.

It didn’t work.

E. tells me that men have “liked” her profile for the sole purpose of asking whether she supports genocide or cares about Gazans.

And then there was this, also from E:

“One ‘matched’ just to write, in all CAPS, ‘DEATH TO ISRAEL!!!’ I immediately deleted his ‘like’ and wish I had reported it. But I have seen him around Ithaca, once at Wegmans—we actually locked eyes—and it was unnerving. And I see him occasionally at a bus stop in my neighborhood.”

This is what Jew hatred looks like when it leaves the campus quad and enters ordinary life. It can show up on a dating app, at the supermarket, or at the bus stop down the street.

A Platform for Jew-haters

Ever since Mosab Abu Toha left Gaza for Syracuse, NY he has become something of a darling of the Jew-hating literati.

His writing from afar about life in post-October 7, 2023 Gaza has been widely published. He has been interviewed by fawning “journalists” on network and cable television programs, collected coveted prizes—including a Pulitzer and a James Beard Award—and secured a comfortable research position in the creative-writing program at nearby Syracuse University.

Toha trades heavily on the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Members of his extended family were killed in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, when Hamas barred civilians from the underground tunnel network it had built to protect terrorists. Toha, of course, tells a very different story: he places responsibility for deaths in Gaza squarely on Israel and repeatedly deploys familiar antizionist tropes.

He has also questioned the circumstances surrounding the Israeli hostages, going so far as to invert the language itself: If Israelis held in Gaza are considered hostages, the same should apply to terrorists imprisoned in Israel.

Toha’s April 25, 2025 appearance in Ithaca was sponsored by Cornell’s an alphabet soup of grievance and “identity” organizations: the Cornell Collective for Justice in Palestine, American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the IRGS (Indigeneity, Race, Gender, and Sexuality) Studies Initiative, the Institute for Comparative Modernities, Literatures in English, Near Eastern Studies, the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) Initiative, Comparative Literature, Cornell University Library, and the Cornell Creative Writing Program.

Buffalo Street Books—whose Jew-hating inventory I have written about elsewhere—hosted the event.

Toha was back in Ithaca on July 12 for a presentation titled “Witnessing and Surviving a Genocide,” sponsored by the Ithaca Committee for Justice in Palestine. His appearances receive generous publicity from Ithaca news outlets and local arts organizations.

But my connection to Toha is more personal.

In 2025, Terence Winch, guest editor of the annual Best American Poetry, anthology selected a Toha poem for inclusion in what would become the final volume of the celebrated series. At first,Toha refused to participate unless my husband David—who created the series in 1988 and served as its editor until last year—publicly denounced Israel.

David has always been an outspoken and proud supporter of Israel. He naturally refused to accede to Toha’s demand.

Toha ultimately agreed to publication. His poem appears in volume, he collected his royalty, and posted an image of the cover on social media.

In other words, ambition trumped principle.

I wish I could add that the Jewish community in Ithaca is united in its efforts to respond to antizionism. Some even identify as antizionist. The reform synagogue hosted antizionist Peter Beinart; the conservative synagogue has devoted seven–seven!!–adult education sessions to discussing his work. This at a time when Jews would be better served by programs that boost morale, strengthen our ties to each other and Israel, and encourage Zionist pride.